Tips For Determining How Much Home Owners Insurance You Need
When it comes to shopping around for a new home owners insurance policy, you will want to consider much more than just how much it will cost you. You need to make sure that for a fair price, you are getting enough insurance to cover your needs. Of course, you need to first know just how much insurance you really need. While having more than enough is okay, not having enough is terrible. Here are a few tips to help you with this:
The Value Of Your Home
This can be a tricky one for people because some want to use the amount they paid for the home or how much their county claims it is worth. However, those figures are not the right ones. What you need is to figure out how much it would cost to build your home all over again, in today's market. For example, you might have received a great deal on your home and only paid $20,000 for it. However, to build it from scratch in today's market, considering all of the repairs and upgrades that you made to the home, it would likely cost a lot more.
The Value Of Your Belongings
Grab a paper and pen and start making a list. Go room by room in your home and count up the number of televisions, computers, other electronic devices, and pieces of expensive art. Figure out what it would cost you to replace all of that if you had to go out today and purchase it all over again. Then figure out the cost of replacing all of your furniture, appliances, clothes for everyone in the house, toys for any children in the home, and anything else you can think of. You will want to add that total to the total you got when calculating how much it would cost to rebuild your home from the ground up. At the bare minimum, this is the amount of coverage that you will want.
If you need further assistance figuring out how much home owners insurance you need, you can always talk with an insurance agent. He or she should have a list of questions to ask in order to determine what your financial needs would be in the event of a total loss of your home. This way, no matter what happens, should anything happen, you will be able to count on that coverage to help you recoup your losses.